Landing on Jupiter’s moon Europa will be even harder than we thought due to a forbidding belt of huge ice spikes that could trap or incapacitate a spacecraft | Continue reading
Openly negative and critical people are often elected leaders, perhaps because we perceive their disregard for social niceties as a sign of power and independence | Continue reading
A special report on limiting global warming to 1.5°C has been released. Get caught up on why it matters | Continue reading
Capsules that are programmed to vibrate when they reach the large intestine have been shown to stimulate bowel contractions and relieve chronic constipation | Continue reading
You wouldn't buy a self-driving car that would kill you to save pedestrians – and that's why we must rethink how we make AI behave, says researcher Iyad Rahwan | Continue reading
The far-right winner of the first round of Brazil's presidential election wants to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and cut down the Amazon rainforest | Continue reading
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been temporarily shut down as technical faults have hampered its ability to point in the right direction | Continue reading
The 2018 Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences has gone to Paul Romer and William Nordhaus for integrating climate change and technology into macroeconomics | Continue reading
A fresh version of David Attenborough's classic book may be light on climate change, but it should inspire a new generation to cherish life on earth | Continue reading
For the first time, astronomers have spotted the shock wave from a powerful space explosion called a gamma ray burst without being able to see the burst itself | Continue reading
Before the Cassini spacecraft melted away in Saturn’s atmosphere, it hurtled between the planet and its rings 22 times - and made some strange discoveries | Continue reading
The power to re-engineer or eliminate wild species using a “gene drive” needs to be brought under international governance, say Simon Terry and Stephanie Howard | Continue reading
Women given a drug that increases blood flow to the womb have a significantly higher chance of giving birth through IVF | Continue reading
Practising public speaking in virtual reality lets people confront their fears in a safe environment and become more confident in front of real-life audiences | Continue reading
They have multiple brains, amazing camouflage abilities and are surprisingly intelligent. But there’s plenty more you might not know about these alien creatures | Continue reading
Most Europeans have a genetic mutation that allows adults to digest milk, but it is less common elsewhere. Now it is spreading through Chile, and we don't know why | Continue reading
MobiLimb is a fake finger that plugs into a phone's USB port. It can provide extra interaction, including stroking your wrist and dragging itself across a table | Continue reading
A huge backlog of NHS hospital waste has been revealed in a leaked report. It is believed to include pharmaceutical waste and a small number of amputated limbs | Continue reading
MobiLimb is a fake finger that plugs into a phone's USB port. It can provide extra interaction, including stroking your wrist and dragging itself across a table | Continue reading
A study has claimed that large-scale wind power in the US would cause significant warming, but this is misleading and could harm take-up of renewables | Continue reading
One mysterious number determines how physics, chemistry and biology work. But controversial experimental hints suggest it's not one number at all | Continue reading
Giving mice a faecal transplant made them more tolerant of a subsequent heart transplant, hinting the gut may be key to avoiding organ rejection | Continue reading
Dating timber used to build European houses between AD 1250 and 1699 reveals that building activity fell during the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War | Continue reading
The fact that the animals can copy vivid patterns that they can't even see is perplexing, but it turns out they might not be using their eyes at all | Continue reading
Last year, New Scientist reported the possible discovery of the first ever exomoon. Now new evidence suggests that if it does exist, it is very strange | Continue reading
Talk of sabotage on the International Space Station has exposed cracks in the US-Russia space relationship that could see NASA unable to fly astronauts into orbit | Continue reading
A pack of brown dogs look like majesties of nature, but they’ve actually been dreamt up by a DeepMind AI | Continue reading
The very first tyrannosaurs were relatively small dinosaurs – and the skull of one of them seems to have contained a brain with a more complex shape than that of the enormous T. rex | Continue reading
Rachel Fort explains how her love of chemistry led to a career developing more efficient lubrication technologies at Nexcel | Continue reading
The chemistry Nobel Prize goes to Frances Arnold, George Smith, and Gregory Winter for controlling evolution to create proteins that solve chemical problems. | Continue reading
Japan has just dropped off its third lander on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. It has less than a day to complete its mission before its batteries run out | Continue reading
A spacecraft currently mapping the Milky Way could be pelted by space dust next week, so the European Space Agency is putting up its shields | Continue reading
Moving a body part in time to a rhythm alters your perception of time, causing it to either stretch or contract – providing new clues about which parts of the brain control our body clocks | Continue reading
Making machines that write stories is incredibly hard. But a new approach from Facebook’s AI team has produced some surprisingly good tales | Continue reading
There is a 300-kilometre-wide ice world in the far reaches of the Solar System - and its orbit is consistent with the presence of the hypothetical Planet X | Continue reading
There is a 300-kilometre-wide ice world in the far reaches of the Solar System - and its orbit is consistent with the presence of the hypothetical Planet X | Continue reading
At last, a third Nobel, but it has been a decidedly mixed week for female physicists | Continue reading
Even though laser beams have no mass, they do have a tiny amount of gravity, which allows them to drag and warp space and slow down time as they propagate | Continue reading
For some they are lifesavers, for others ineffective and even addictive. Our special report looks at why even experts disagree on antidepressants, and what the real truth is | Continue reading
A talk by a physicist at CERN suggesting that women aren’t as good as men at physics has sparked outrage. I was there, and people are right to be offended, says Jess Wade | Continue reading
We can now decode dreams and recreate images of faces people have seen, and everyone from Facebook to Elon Musk wants a piece of this mind reading reality | Continue reading
Mathematician Michael Atiyah has presented his claimed proof of one of the most famous unsolved problems in maths, but others remain cautiously sceptical | Continue reading
Michael Atiyah, a famed UK mathematician, claims that he has a "simple proof" of the Riemann hypothesis, a key unsolved question about the nature of prime numbers | Continue reading
Your scalp can "smell" things - and when it detects synthetic sandalwood, the rate of hair growth increases | Continue reading
Michael Atiyah, a famed UK mathematician, claims that he has a "simple proof" of the Riemann hypothesis, a key unsolved question about the nature of prime numbers | Continue reading
Michael Atiyah, a famed UK mathematician, claims that he has a "simple proof" of the Riemann hypothesis, a key unsolved question about the nature of prime numbers | Continue reading
Michael Atiyah, a famed UK mathematician, claims that he has a "simple proof" of the Riemann hypothesis, a key unsolved question about the nature of prime numbers | Continue reading